Peddling Papers in the Age of Sail and Steam
The American newsboy was born in New York. This was no chance occurrence. With a population of more than 200,000, “Gotham” was the largest city in North America. Its year-round harbor had long made it a bustling port, but the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 transformed it into a continental center of trade, finance, and manufacture. Goods flowed up and down the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, and back and forth across the Atlantic. Called the “Empire City,” New York thrived on the exchange of information as well as commodities. It was home to thirty-six weekly newspapers and eleven dailies with an average circulation of 1,700 copies.
Then a new paper joined the ranks. In September 1833, a handful of boys— including Bill Lovell, age 9; Bernard Flaherty, 10; Henry Lewis Gassert, 11; and Sam Messenger, age unknown—responded to a want ad placed among the theatrical notices in an odd little paper called the Sun. “TO THE UNEMPLOYED.— A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy and sell again.”
The publisher was Benjamin Day, a journey printer. His appeal to the unemployed made sense as joblessness was a recurring condition in urban America, especially among those who had not yet reached or were already past their prime. Street peddling offered many families their only means of subsistence. Men, women, and children had hawked a variety of goods and services on the streets of New York before 1833; they sold hot corn on the cob, fresh eels, and hominy. They cut wood, sharpened knives, and swept chimneys. But they didn’t cry papers. At 6¢ a copy, the leading journals were too expensive to find casual buyers. Dubbed “blanket sheets,” these papers unfolded to a four-foot width and required a library table or counting house desk to be read. They contained a blend of commercial news and high-flown opinion, and held little appeal for the working classes, for whom 6¢ represented a half-day’s wage, or the equivalent of a pound of sugar or block of cheese. Nor was their business sought as most publishers considered it undignified to pander to new subscribers. One in New York boasted that his great circulation of 2,000 had come unsolicited.
The Sun, by contrast, cost just a penny. Its four pages measured 8½ by 11 inches, and it offered sensational stories of murder, scandal, and scientific wonders. Day’s intended readers were wage earners and mechanics like himself. To reach them, he offered subscriptions at a low $3 per year, payable up front. The sixpenny dailies charged $10 a year, payable after six months; by trusting their subscribers— extending them credit, as it were— some of these papers carried arrears totaling $10,000 to $50,000. Day broke with custom by operating on a cash basis. The only problem was that profits on the penny sheet looked to be so low that men could not be persuaded to hawk them. Desperate to disseminate his first issues, Day turned to the city’s most abundant resource: its children. Almost half of New Yorkers were under 20, and boys between 5 and 15—the age group of most of his recruits—numbered 19,000, about 10 percent of the population. Scores had been orphaned by the recent cholera epidemic and were already hustling or begging in the streets.
Day engaged the venturesome Lovell, the affable Flaherty, the energetic Gassert, the capable Messenger, and a half dozen other boys at $2 a week. Born in England in 1824, Lovell had been in the United States for less than a year. He and Flaherty, a native of Cork, Ireland, were among the 540,000 immigrants, more than 40 percent of them Irish, who came to the United States in the 1830s. Flaherty’s father operated a grocery, or tavern, on the Bowery, and his mother ran a boardinghouse. In addition to hustling papers, he picked up odd jobs and small roles at a local theater.
Gassert was born in Kurnbach, Germany, in 1822. His father was an artist and scholar who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area then patched with cornfields. Little is known about Sam Messenger except that he was old enough to be listed as a “papercarrier” in city directories, sold 700 copies of the Sun a day in the Fulton Market district, and organized routes and carriers that proved to be quite lucrative. Day assigned districts to all the boys, which he instructed them not to desert until they had sold 125 copies. Otherwise, they had complete control of their areas; they could stroll for customers, which was Lovell and Flaherty’s approach, or build subscription routes, which was Messenger’s method. Or, like Gassert, they could do both. Day offered additional copies at 9¢ a dozen, which many boys requested after just a few hours. At first he bought back unsold copies, but he stopped when he learned that the boys were returning papers they had rented out. These first newsboys worked for a combination of wages and profits and exercised a kind of artisanal autonomy. The “active boys” in the squad earned $5 a week, which compared well to the incomes of others in the industry; reporters earned $3 a week and journeymen printers $7. The Sun’s daily circulation rapidly reached 10,000, and routes sold for $30 to $60. By 1840 it would rely on the services of a hundred carriers of all ages.
An impish newsboy trolls for business among the black and white longshoremen on New York’s waterfront, ca. 1850. “On the Waterfront,” in H. G. Cantzler, Sketchbook, 1849-50, Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library.
Newsboys were thickest around New York’s waterfront. The city had four ferry piers serving Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jersey City, and six steam lines to Hartford, New Haven, Providence, Philadelphia, and Albany. Dockhands and shipbuilders also proved to be steady customers. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, busy producing sail and steam ships, employed so many immigrants that a nativist newspaper scoffed that the Irish Volunteer and Boston Pilot were “the most popular papers the newsboys can carry into this Irish Navy Yard in America.”
Newsboys also sold on board ships and ferries, often securing passage by slipping a paper to a crewman. Some boys proffered books, magazines, and fresh fruit as well, carrying enough stock under their arms “to load a common-dray horse.” On an excursion up the Hudson River, Whig writer N. P. Willis complained that these “varlets of newsboys” shattered the “customary repose of steamship travel” with “‘Here’s the Star!’ ‘Buy the old major’s paper, sir?’ ‘Here’s the Express!’ ‘Buy the New Ery!’ ‘Would you like a New Era, sir?’ ‘Take a Sun, miss?’ And a hundred such deafening cries, to which New-York has of late years become subject.” Willis called it the “babel of a metropolis,” which hardly waned on the return trip as the boys picked up local papers to sell on board and back in New York.
Ships bringing newspapers and passengers from Europe also attracted “precocious urchins” like John Hoey, who rowed out to fetch and sell papers on the Norwich steamers before they docked. Charles Dickens’s ship was similarly besieged in 1842, as was the protagonist of his novel, The Life and Adventure of Martin Chuzzlewit. A violent election, noted Chuzzlewit, “found fresh life and notoriety in the breath of the news-boys, who not only proclaimed them with shrill yells in all the highways and bye-ways of the town, upon the wharves and among the shipping, but on the deck and down in the cabins of the steam-boat; which, before she touched the shore, was boarded and over-run by a legion of those young citizens.” Among the fictional papers they cried were the New York Sewer, Stabber, and Family Spy.
Some newsboys regarded certain ships as their private property. “Let a strange boy make his appearance on any of these consecrated grounds,” said the Flash, “and he fares worse than a wounded porpoise in the midst of a school.”
Fighting was indeed part of the job; newsboys had to fight to protect their turf, their stock, their earnings, and their honor. They were even known to assault editors who failed to get their paper out on time, as such delays cut into their sales. Some boys preferred to settle disputes on neutral ground across the Hudson or East rivers. In 1844 the Herald reported that two Sun newsboys, Daniel Daly and James Edmonds, were arrested for creating a disturbance and throwing stones, and were committed to a New Jersey prison “until they know how to behave.” A similar case occurred in 1851 when police in Red Hook, Brooklyn, got wind of a gang fight to take place on a Sunday morning between rival newsboys in Manhattan. The boys thought Red Hook was beyond the reach of the law, but officers met their flotilla of skiffs at daybreak and turned them away. Still determined to settle scores, the belligerents rowed off toward Weehawken, New Jersey.
Shipping news was of special concern to merchants, seamen, and their families in antebellum New York. Newsboys sometimes exploited their unease with alarming cries about overdue ships. “News of the Atlantic,” some of them yelled in February 1851, referring to the ocean, not the missing ship. “The little rascals well know how to touch the springs of anxiety in the public breast, and turn excitements to their pecuniary advantage,” chided the Brooklyn Eagle. When the ship arrived a few days later, newsboys worked through the night. “But no one,” said the New York Tribune, “could lose his temper at being awakened by the words: ‘The Atlantic is safe!’” Real disasters, such as the sinking of the Arctic off Newfoundland in 1854 with a loss of more than 320 lives, generated profits exceeding $5 a day by the most obstreperous newsboys.
News of shipwrecks created a sensation in the age of sail and steam. James McNeill Whistler, “Terrible Disaster! Loss of the Arctic!!” (1854). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Acc. No. 1970.121.43.
Newsboys also conspired to raise prices when conditions warranted. Brooklyn boys who showed up at the ferry and found papers in short supply were known to sell the 1¢ Sun for 4¢ and the 2¢ Herald for 10 pence or a shilling. Carriers further boosted earnings by supplying copies of the Sun to Herald subscribers or renting papers by the hour.
Given the ebb and flow of sales, scams, and sidelines, newsboys’ incomes varied greatly. The Brooklyn Eagle said its boys typically earned 3 or 4 shillings (35¢ to 50¢) a day. Dick Lafferty, the lame newsboy in Joseph Holt Ingraham’s 1843 temperance novel Jemmy Daily; or, The Little News Vendor, sometimes sold over a hundred papers a day and once earned $1 and 9 pence. The Broadway Belle told readers of a little boy on crutches who sold 170 Belles one rainy Friday in 1855 and brought $1.70 home to his mother. Novelist Cornelius Mathews said that newsboys made $2 to $3 from a steamer’s “extras,” selling as many as 150 papers in an hour. Apparently these earnings did not suffice, as newsboys accounted for 40 to 50 percent of all minors arrested for theft in New York in the late 1840s.
Most newsboys lived in humble lodgings with their families. Some lived communally in houses rented for them by their suppliers. A noticable fraction were homeless. These children made their beds in an ingenious array of places—in old crates and hogsheads along the waterfront; under steps and bridges; on benches and barges; in stables and market stalls. Two newsboys, little warmed by the irony, slept one winter in a burned-out safe on Wall Street. Another choice location was over steam gratings, or “iron bedsteads.” They provided warmth on cold nights, but could burn exposed skin. The most convenient gratings were located above the giant steam presses of the dailies. Police routinely scared up thirty or forty boys sleeping along Nassau and Ann streets.
Keeping clean posed a challenge to street boys. Baths were rare even for children who had homes, as few tenements were piped with Croton water. Most New Yorkers made do with backyard privies, as a comprehensive underground sewage system was still on the drawing boards. A good soak could be had at the free or cheap public baths recently established in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities. Fountains also served the purpose, but the sight of urchins scrubbing themselves in public upset genteel urbanites and embarrassed some bathers. A reporter who once met his regular newsboy “disporting himself like a grampus” at a park pump remarked that the boy “blushed scarlet.” “Had I caught him carrying the pump away, he could not have been more abashed.”
River bathing offered another alternative. Johnny Morrow, author of the 1860 memoir A Voice fromthe Newsboys, enjoyed summer dips in the East or Hudson rivers with his friends. His successors protested when authorities banned river swimming in the 1870s. “I am a news-boy, and a poor boy, and I know just how acceptible [sic] a bath is in the heat of summer,” wrote one lad on behalf of his pals. “Can you not in some way use the influence of your paper so as to get us the privilege of making ourselves clean by bathing in the river? It would go far to make better citizens, at any rate more clean and healthy ones, of us, and we will not forget THE TIMES.”
To feed themselves, newsboys sometimes bartered papers or ran errands for victualers. A fresh paper might net a piece of bread or a scrap of meat. One eld-erly woman known as the “Fulton street cake aunty” kept accounts for boys who were short of cash. Newsboys also dined at cheap refectories such as the Nassau coffee saloon in the basement of the Sun building, where bare feet and ragged trousers were no grounds for being chucked out. “The Proprietor knows the Newsboys very well and makes considerable allowances for their caste,” observed a visitor. “He sees them every day, industrious, and self-dependent, and if they happen to be unfortunate in the sale of papers or other speculations— he trusts them— and they very rarely ‘step out.’”
Antebellum cities were gastronomic emporiums, even for children who counted their earnings by the penny. Morrow said newsboys used to treat themselves to a cup of coffee and a dozen griddle cakes at a saloon for 9¢ after the rush for morning papers was over. And it was not uncommon after a good day for them “to march into a restaurant and order a dinner of venison or woodcock, with sauces, which would not be despised by an alderman.” Such a feast could be had for 12¢ in New York, but prices were higher elsewhere. The well-traveled Danny Sullivan complained that a 6¢ beefsteak in New York cost 20¢ in Boston. Happily, his favorite dish was the more affordable mackerel— “splendid fish, that.”
Object
Newspapers
Body of Water
Hudson River, East River, New York Harbor
About the Artist
Vincent DiGirolamo teaches history at Baruch College and is the author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboy (Oxford University Press, 2019).